“Ali—it’s me—”
I went inside, shouting. From upstairs music pounded, Ali warbling along with “Gimme Shelter.” I stuck my head into the living room, a cavernous glass-walled space with built-in white furniture that made it look like a cross between a space capsule and a sepulchre. No sign of Ali’s father, save for an empty pitcher beading a glass coffee table with condensation.
“Lit!” Ali bellowed. “Get your ass up here—”
I went upstairs. Ali grabbed my arm and yanked me into her room, dancing over to turn down the stereo. There were Pre-Raphaelite posters on the walls alongside the Beardsley image of Tristan and Isolde; Polaroids of Ali and Hillary and Duncan and myself; a picture of Noddy Holder torn from Circus magazine. A cone of jasmine incense smoked on Ali’s desk, but I could still smell pot and tobacco smoke. “Where the hell you been? ’Cause I had this great idea—”
“Is it about food? Because I’m—”
“No—your hair, I’m going to henna your hair—” I scowled, but Ali ignored me. “I know I’ve got some henna left—”
“But I’m starving, please, Ali—”
She pushed by me and made for the bureau. “This’ll be great, you’ll look so fucking great—”
It took her a while, fumbling through drawers jammed with mascara wands and Biba lipgloss, L’air du Temps perfume and plastic envelopes of birth control pills, worn-out ballet shoes and innumerable black leotards.
“Hah! Here it is—” She held up an enameled metal tin decorated with hieroglyphs. “I was afraid I’d thrown it out.”
Resigned, I sank onto her bed. “Will it still be any good?”
“Definitely. This stuff lasts forever. Cleopatra probably used this same box—”
She pried it open and stuff like greenish smoke filled the air. Ali pinched some henna between her fingers, redolent of dried grass and incense.
“It looks like dirt,” I said.
“Oh, shut up and sit down. And put this over your shoulders. Just wait, Lit, you’ll be beautiful—”
She mixed henna and water in a cracked Wedgwood bowl, then carefully smoothed the greenish clay onto my hair. “Oh, man. At the party tonight they’ll be crazy for you. It’ll make you gorgeous.”
What it did was turn my hair flaming orange, the precise shade of a fox’s pelt in full winter growth. I shrieked when I looked into the mirror. Ali grinned.
“Wow. It looks great, Lit.” She dried my hair, leaving muddy streaks on the towel. “God, it looks so great. See, your hair should always have been this color. You just want to pet it—”
She touched it gingerly, that glowing mass that didn’t really belong to me. “Ooh, yeah. Excellent.”
I stood in front of the full-length mirror and glared. “God damn it, Ali. I oughta kill you—”
“One of these days your face is gonna stay like that,” Ali said, and tapped my nose. “Smile.”
“I look like that thing at Jamie’s house.”
“What? The sitar?”
“No, you idiot. The gorgon. The Medusa.”
She went to the window, hoisted herself onto the sill and lit a cigarette. “I think it looks totally cool. Before your hair was so—well, it was just beige. This is much better. Here, hold this—”
She shoved the cigarette at me and hopped off the sill. “—I’m getting dressed.”
She slid out of her Danskin and pulled on a velveteen Norma Kamali minidress with heart-shaped cutouts in the bodice, fluffed her hair, and proceeded to spend forty-five minutes putting on mascara. I kicked off my boots and jeans and got into my dress.
“Don’t you dare put your hair up,” Ali yelled when I started tugging my damp curls into a braid. “Just leave it. Look”— She stood behind me, close enough that I could catch the smoky smell of her skin, sweat and tobacco and jasmine. —“see how pretty it is now?” She thrust her fingers into it. “Medusa. Is that the one who started the Trojan War?”
“No, Ali. Medusa is the one who turned everybody to stone.”
She laughed. “So you can be the one who gets everybody stoned. Ha!”
I put my boots back on and we went downstairs. Despite the chill, Constantine, Ali’s father, was sitting out on the back deck overlooking the woods, a pitcher of screwdrivers on the table beside him. He was a slight man, with dark hair and Ali’s golden eyes, his sharp features starting to go slack from too much drink.
“Charlotte!” he said. “What happened to your face?”
“My face?” I clapped my hands to my cheeks in dismay.
He pointed at my dress. “It’s the only part of you that’s not orange.”
“C’mon, Dad, leave her alone.” Ali peered at a sheaf of blueprints stretched across the table. “What’s that?”
“Just some sketches I’m putting together for Axel’s opera.”
“I thought Ralph Casson was doing design for that,” Ali said innocently. She plucked an ice cube from the pitcher and ran it across her cheeks. “I mean, that’s what I heard.”
Constantine looked annoyed. He refilled his glass, took a long swallow, and said, “Well, he’s not. Ralph Casson is building the sets. I’m designing them. And I don’t want you trashing the plans, okay?” He replaced his drink and reached for one of the designs, but Ali grabbed his hand.
“Oh, please, Daddy—can we see?” Ali leaned over the table. “Hey, this is pretty cool. Check it out, Lit.”
She poked her finger at the blueprint, tracing something that looked vaguely like a chambered nautilus. “Dad? What is this? A pyramid?”
He shook his head. “It’s supposed to be a labyrinth—see, it’s kind of a cutaway view, so from the audience you’re looking inside it. These are all just preliminary sketches”— He picked up his drink. —“it’s actually a bitch to get the sightlines right. I have no idea how it’s going to work.”
I stood beside Ali and looked at each design as she flipped through them. All showed the Miniver Amphitheater, a small open-air theater on the Bolerium estate that dated back to Acherley Darnell’s time. Actually, calling it a “theater” was stretching a point. Despite the Kamensic Village Preservation Society’s continuing (and unsuccessful) efforts to have it declared a National Historic Site, the amphitheater was little more than a natural declivity on the mountainside, with stone and wooden benches set into the surrounding slope. Over the decades, the granite slabs had gradually sunk into the earth; their mossy tops now thrust at odd angles from the grass, like the remains of an ancient barrow. In Acherley Darnell’s time, the writer and his cronies often staged plays there, for their own amusement and the entertainment of the villagers.
Since then the amphitheater had fallen into decay. I dimly recalled attending a child’s birthday there when I was six or seven, and every few years the Preservation Society hosted a garden tea with Mrs. Langford officiating. But the staging area was small. More than sixty or seventy people would crowd the hillside.
“Isn’t it kind of dinky?” I asked. “I mean, for an opera?”
“Yup. But Ariadne isn’t Aida—it’s just one act and a prologue, small cast, no elaborate sets. In fact, Axel is actually dropping the prologue”— Constantine tapped a finger alongside his nose. —“and this is where it gets kind of neat. He’s gotten his hands on a fragment of a lost play by Euripides called Theseus at Knossos, and he’s going to stage it as the prelude to Ariadne auf Naxos.”